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The Latest news on LinkedIn’s IPO

Reuters Photo. Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner as Market Opens with new LNKD offering

From the Horse’e Mouth:  The LinkedIn Blog on IPO:  LNKD: Changing the way professionals do business by Nick Besbeas

Today marks an important milestone in LinkedIn’s history – we started trading at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) – following our recent IPO filing. Our stock symbol is LNKD (as you may have guessed from this post) and we’ve announced our initial public offering of 7,840,000 shares of common stock at a price to the public of $45.00 per share.

Love this By Rex Crum, at MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Technology stocks headed for an active trading session Thursday, as investors reacted to the market debut of online professional-networking company LinkedIn Corp.

LinkedIn’s LNKD +96.96% shares climbed more than 83% to $82.37 after its initial public offering priced at $45 a share. Read more about LinkedIn’s IPO.

Among leading tech stocks, gains came from Apple Inc. AAPL +0.01% , Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO +0.56% , Oracle Corp. ORCL +1.05% and Amazon.com Inc. AMZN +0.63%

Find the original story here:  http://www.marketwatch.com/story/linkedins-ipo-takes-tech-sector-spotlight-2011-05-19?reflink=MW_news_stmp

Benjamin Pimentel of MarketWatch goes into a little more detail here:

LinkedIn shares nearly doubled Thursday morning in a strong public trading debut highlighting investor interest in social-networking companies.

LinkedIn’s stock LNKD +99.36% soared about 90% to $85.36 in early trading, as the professional networking site began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Propelled by robust demand leading up to its initial public offering, LinkedIn’s IPO priced at $45 a share, at the top end of a recently raised range of $42 to $45 a share. Previously, the IPO pricing range had been $32 to $35.

The Mountain View, Calif.–based company is seen as the first in what could be a wave of social-networking IPOs, which could soon include Facebook and Groupon.

The Guardian is talking about it over in Europe too:

LinkedIn shares soar after flotation:  Business networking site’s value almost doubles to $8.5bn as investors’ appetite for technology companies continues.   LinkedIn, the first major US social network to go public, saw its valuation rocket to $8.5bn (£5.3bn) after its flotation on the New York stock exchange on Thursday – $5bn higher than anticipated.

Shares in LinkedIn traded hands at $90 each in the opening minutes of its market debut – almost double what the company expected to earn on Wednesday evening.

LinkedIn’s stellar NYSE debut is the clearest sign yet that stock markets are in the grip of a new technology and digital media bubble, fuelled by the ever-larger valuations of social media companies.

The business networking site, founded by the internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman in 2002, raised $353m with its initial public offering on Wednesday evening, which valued the firm at $4.3bn. The firm last week said it was looking to raise $175m with the IPO.

LinkedIn’s flotation makes it easily the highest valuation of a US internet firm since Google went public in 2004.

LinkedIn has about 100 million users and turned a profit of $15.4m on revenues of $243m in 2010. At $8.3bn, LinkedIn is valued at 35 times last year’s revenues.

Though other social networks are far larger, notably Facebook with about 700 million users worldwide, the business orientation of LinkedIn’s members make them potentially more valuable to advertisers. The company managed to grow through the recession and turned profitable last year, having made operating losses from 2007 until 2009.

LinkedIn offered 7.8m shares at $45 each – well above its previously expected price range of $32-$35. Hoffman, the co-founder and chairman, and the chief executive, Jeffrey Weiner, offered shares equating to less than 0.5% of the company.

Some of the firm’s backers – Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs and McGraw-Hill – offered 3m shares in the IPO. LinkedIn offered a further 4.8m shares.

Other major investors – Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, which together own about two-fifths of the company – did not participate in the offering.

LinkedIn’s flotation is expected to spark a social media goldrush, with some of the internet’s most exciting – if not profit-making – companies going public.

Groupon, the online discount business which spurned a $6bn offer from Google in December last year, is expected to float this year, as is Zynga, the maker of popular Facebook games, FarmVille and CityVille.

The multibillion dollar flotations will also stoke investor appetite in Facebook, the world’s largest social network, which is likely to dwarf the valuations of the internet firms that have recently gone public with its IPO, expected in the next 12 months. The company was valued at $50bn in January but its privately held shares have since traded at prices that suggest it could be worth more than $70bn.

Here’s what Mashable had to say:

LinkedIn IPO: Is It a Good Buy? by Adam Ostrow9

Business social networking site LinkedIn is set to go public on Thursday, marking one of the highest profile Internet IPOs since Google’s in 2004 and spurring talk of whether we’ve entered another tech bubble as valuations for startups continue to climb.

Earlier this week, LinkedIn raised the price of its offering by 30%, in turn valuing the company at north of $4 billion. As WSJ noted, the increase was the biggest pre-IPO bump since 2000, when the last tech bubble popped. (As a side note, 63.67% of our readers thought Microsoft paid too much when it bought Skype for $8.5 billion last week).

That said, LinkedIn does have significant revenue ($243 million last year), is still growing quite fast and is increasingly profitable, something that can’t be said for many of the dotcoms of yesteryear. Here’s how its likely price to revenue ratio stacks up to some other publicly traded Internet companies (data via Yahoo! Finance):

• RenRen: 65.2
• Baidu: 33.1
• LinkedIn: 16.4
• Salesforce.com: 10.4
• Google: 5.5
• Demand Media: 4.4